Good News: The Smart-Speaker Wars Are About to Begin

When Amazon released the Amazon Echo at the end of 2014, its success took nearly everyone by surprise. The Echo created a market new enough that there still isn’t broad consensus on what, exactly, to call it. Home speakers? Home smart speakers? Smart speakers? AI speakers? All get used interchangeably. (We’ll go with “smart speakers” for now.) But all the terms refer to the same basic idea: a speaker that sits somewhere in your home that you interact with mainly through voice, whether that’s asking it to play music or to give you the weather forecast.

The Google Home, it could be argued, is in many ways the superior product to the Echo. It understands natural language requests better than Alexa, it can differentiate between different users based on their voice, and it can place voice phone calls to anyone (not just other Echo owners). But it’s suffered from an early release that saw it unable to do many of the things the Echo could do, such as shop or allow third-party integrations. It’s since improved, and Google seems committed for the long haul, but it’s struggling to make up lost ground.

At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) today, Apple, the most valuable company in the world and by far the most recognized consumer electronics manufacturer, unveiled the HomePod, entering the smart speaker market — and that changes everything.

In typical Apple fashion, the HomePod was pitched at solving the problems with preexisting products. Home speakers like Sonos sound great, but you can’t talk to them. Smart speakers like the Echo allow for voice interaction but (according to Apple) don’t sound that great. The HomePod will change all that, using a combination of high-quality audio and “spatial awareness” tech to deliver noticeably better sound than its competition. It’ll also have Siri embedded, meaning anything you can ask Siri on your phone you can ask a HomePod, in addition to using it to control smart-home devices using Apple’s Home Kit.

Also in typical Apple fashion, it’s pricing itself above the competition. While the Google Home retails for $129 and the Echo for $179 (with semi-frequent sales on both), the HomePod will go on sale for $349. This thing better sound really, really good.

Indeed, at both WWDC and in its press release, Apple is pitching the HomePod as primarily a way to play music and not as a home assistant. It “reinvents home music” — but it doesn’t reinvent the home assistant.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is that, at least anecdotally, most people still use their Echo (or Google Home) as a way to play music easily. All the other features — whether getting a quick news briefing or asking about the forecast — are secondary. So why not deliver the best sound possible?

The less generous view is that while Siri was one of the first voice assistants introduced back in 2011, it has since been surpassed by Alexa and especially Google’s Assistant, both of which are able to understand natural language better than Siri on average. So Apple is forced to focus on music, because Siri simply can’t stand up as a home assistant.

The common wisdom is that Apple is rarely first, but it’s usually best. After all, there were computers with graphical user interfaces before the Macintosh, MP3 players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone. But there have been other market categories where Apple hasn’t been first or best. Apple Music, despite years of work, still lags behind Spotify and was recently, according to one analysis, surpassed by Amazon Prime Music (helped, no doubt, by the rise of the Echo). The Apple TV has also struggled, with declining sales, placing it behind Roku, the Amazon Fire, and the Google Chromecast. In 2007, it made a foray into high-quality audio equipment, attempting to beat audio companies creating iPod docks at their own game with the Apple Hi-Fi. It was a disaster and was quickly pulled from store shelves. (It was also, perhaps forebodingly, priced at $349.)

But the smart-speaker market is still nascent. Per consulting firm Strategy Analytics, smart-speaker sales were up by nearly 600 percent in 2016 compared to 2015, with 4.2 million smart speakers sold in the fourth quarter (about 88 percent of those were Amazon products, and 10 percent were Google). In that same quarter, Apple sold 9.3 million iPads — a declining part of its business.

And Apple has some real advantages that Google and Amazon lack: a long track record of excellent hardware, a customer base that’s accustomed to paying more, and over 500 retail stores worldwide where potential buyers will be able to see (and hear) the HomePod before buying. To my ears, both the Echo and the Home sound pretty decent — but I’m also stacking them up against other wireless Bluetooth speakers, few of which are known among audiophiles as being particularly fantastic. Perhaps the HomePod will be such a leap forward in sound that it makes the Echo sound like a tin can. And tech geeks who have already bought an Echo might scoff at Apple’s high price tag, but Apple fans might not. (Apple-owned Beats headphones, after all, have sold spectacularly, even with audiophiles holding their nose at the sound. Branding is easy to roll your eyes at, but it works.)

There are still a lot of unknowns. Will the HomePod require you to use Apple Music? Will it work with non-iOS devices at all? At $349, few people are going to want to spread these devices throughout their home — will Apple offer something like the Echo Dot for automation control throughout the home? Apple is promising enhanced privacy, but it’s unclear what exactly that means — or how different its policies will be compared to what Amazon or Google do to protect your data with their smart speakers.

There is one certainty: Because a smart speaker can effectively keep you within a company’s ecosystem, smart speakers are about to become a battleground, with the four most valuable companies in the world (Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, in that order) all attempting to capture market share in the vast majority of homes that don’t have a smart speaker. But while that sharp-elbowed competition can be tough on companies, it’s ultimately good for the consumer. There’s a decent chance a huge number of people will have a smart speaker in their home within the next decade. The question is whose speaker it’ll be.

The Pentagon is set to begin a drawdown of its 5,800 troops from the Southwest border as early as this week, the Army commander overseeing the mission told POLITICO today — even as the approaching caravan of refugees prompted U.S. customs officers to close a port of entry near Tijuana, Mexico.

All the active-duty troops that President Donald Trump ordered sent to the border before the midterm elections should be home by Christmas, said Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is running the mission from San Antonio, Texas.

A shooting at a Chicago hospital has wounded multiple people, including a suspect and a police officer, authorities said.

Shots were fired Monday afternoon at Mercy Hospital on the city’s South Side, and officers were searching the facility. Police issued a statement on Twitter saying there were “reports of multiple victims.”

A witness named James Gray told Chicago television station ABC 7 that he saw multiple people shot: “It looked like he was turning and shooting people at random.”

From @presssec: new rules for reporters at WH press conferences.- one question per reporter, then yield floor and microphone.- followup question “may be permitted.” Then yield floor and microphone.- “failure to abide” may result in suspension/revocation” of WH press pass.

so, the conventional wisdom on election night was that democrats had not achieved the resounding repudiation of president trump they were looking for. yes, they’d won the house, but not overwhelmingly. and progressive favorites stacey abrams, andrew gillum, and beto o’rourke had gone down to defeat. meanwhile, republicans had made slight gains in the senate. a few days later, the thinking shifted in Democrats’ favor, as more late-breaking results came in from various states, especially california, which is notoriously slow at counting ballots, and where the party did extremely well. we’re not almost two weeks out from the election, enough time to look at things more dispassionately. how do you rate the performance now?

Trying to get away from the endless and interminable and redundant arguments over how to define a “wave.”

Benjamin Hart3:10 PM

yes, I agree, there is little more tedious than parsing what defines a wave

Ed Kilgore3:11 PM

Democrats won the House popular vote and picked up 37 or 38 seats. Dems won 22 of 34 Senate races (with one in Mississippi still to go), and by just about any measure, more Senate votes. And they picked up seven net governorship and seven state legislative chambers.

Part of the problem is that an insanely pro-GOP Senate landscape made a good Democratic performance look bad.

And the other problem was sky-high Democratic expectations, plus the overwhelming attention given to close races in Florida, Georgia and Texas.

Which all went Republican.

Benjamin Hart3:13 PM

yes, and the pressure to prematurely label the evening one way or another, which is endemic to election coverage (and which I don’t see going away any time soon)

the other thing, I think, is that trump is such an outlier of a person and president that some people view anything less than a sweeping rejection the likes of which we’ve never seen before as a bit of a letdown

Ed Kilgore3:14 PM

Yeah, the commentariat has not adjusted well to the slow counts that ever-increasing voting-by-mail plus provisional ballots have introduced.

As for Trump, I guess part of the polarization over him is that it’s hard for partisans to interpret anything that happens as anything other than total victory or defeat for MAGA. And the MSM tends to respond with quick judgments of a “split decision,” which is very misleading.

Benjamin Hart3:20 PM

yep. haven’t seen TOO much of that since the election, to be fair. but back to the actual gains made by dems, which it’s easy to lose track of amid the hundreds of results. what do you think was their most important victory other than winning the House? for me, it might have been knocking off scott walker in wisconsin.

Ed Kilgore3:23 PM

Guess it depends on your interpretation of “important.” If you mean “soul-satisfying for progressives,” then yeah, finally taking down the guy who had most consistently applied the worst kind of conservative policies to a previously progressive state was a very big deal.

Sweeping Orange County, California’s congressional seats was another big deal emotionally, particularly for those of us old enough to remember O.C. as a John Birch Society hotbed.

From a more practical point of view, all those congressional wins mattered–first, as part of a House takeover, and second, as a foundation for (maybe) a Dem reconquest of the Senate in 2020.

And the gubernatorial and state legislative gains will help with the next round of redistricting, though there’s some unfinished business on that front in 2020.

As I’ve argued at some length, even some losses were important for Dems–particularly the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial elections and the Texas Senate race. They showed that finally “national Democrats” (including African-Americans) can do better in the former Confederacy than Blue Dogs–at least in states with the requisite combination of a large minority vote and some upscale suburbs.

Benjamin Hart3:29 PM

yes, and that may also have big repercussion in terms of what kind of candidate democrats want to nominate in 2020

Ed Kilgore3:30 PM

Well, it certainly reinforces the idea that there’s a “sunbelt strategy” for 2020 that could work as an alternative to Democrats obsessing about the Rust Belt states Trump carried.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right – arizona and georgia really could be in play

and, of course, florida

Ed Kilgore3:31 PM

And North Carolina.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right.

so, all in all, a democratic party that is somewhat addicted to being traumatized should be feeling pretty good

Ed Kilgore3:35 PM

Yeah. There were some painful near-misses, but not really much grounds for a struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-party thing. That’s good, since Democrats will need all their energy to winnow their 40-candidate presidential field.

A Florida elections expert digs into what went wrong for Democrats on Tuesday

This election was the third consecutive Governor’s race decided by a point or less, bracketing two consecutive Presidential elections decided by a point. This drives homes two points: One, Florida, for all its dynamic growth and demographic changes, is very stable; and Two, when organizations like Quinnipiac try to peddle off polls showing candidates in Florida with 6-point leads, or 9-point leads, you now know what to do with that information (a post/rant on public polling is coming soon).

There are a lot of reasons why Florida is very competitive…but it is what it is. Big chunks of Florida cancel each other out, and both parties have large, and quite dug-in bases – and neither have a base that alone gets them to 50% + 1. Winning Florida (or losing it) is about managing the margins throughout Florida.

16 Democratic representatives signed a letter opposing Nancy Pelosi for House speaker … but she still has no announced challenger

… Pelosi could lose as many as 15 Democratic votes when she stands for election as speaker on Jan. 3. One of the 16 signers, Ben McAdams (Utah), is now trailing Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah) and might never cast a speaker vote.

Not signing the letter is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), who has publicly opposed Pelosi and is now mulling a run against her. Fudge said Friday she would not make a final decision on whether to run until next week at the earliest.

Another five Democrats — Rep. Conor Lamb (Pa.) and Reps.-elect Jason Crow (Colo.), Jared Golden (Maine), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and Abigail Spanberger (Va.) — have made firm statements saying they would not vote for Pelosi but did not sign the letter.

stacey abrams and andrew gillum both conceded their elections this weekend to their republican opponents after protracted post-election battle. realistically, did either of them have any other option but to call it quits?

Zak Cheney-Rice11:47 AM

I think with Gillum the outcome was more or less decided on election night. His race was always more of a long shot than Bill Nelson’s reelection bid — the other high-profile Florida contest that dragged on into last week — and was never as close as that one. But I think it’s important to note that Abrams was pretty intentional about not conceding, in the traditional sense. She basically said, in so many words, that Kemp’s victory would have to stand because she saw no other available legal recourse available. I think she knew her options included dragging this out longer, but also knew that, legally, there wasn’t much she could do to alter the outcome.

But she has said she will continue to pursue issues around election integrity in Georgia, and I think that will include several (more) legal challenges to Kemp’s win, or at least to the mechanisms that facilitated it

Benjamin Hart11:48 AM

yes, she did not praise kemp, and called his win “legal” but refused to say that he was “legitimate” when asked by jake tapper

Zak Cheney-Rice11:52 AM

Yeah the question of legitimacy seems to be a sticking point for a lot of folks. There’s a Slate piece (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/georgia-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp-election-not-stolen.html) circulating today arguing that we shouldn’t describe the Georgia election as “stolen,” and the first reason listed is because it could lead more and more people to see American elections as illegitimate. But I think the cat is pretty far out the bag on that one. He’s out and running down the street. I live in Atlanta and there are piles of little cards littering the streets around Piedmont Park (the city’s Central Park equivalent) that read, “Stolen Votes.” There are many, many people who believe this election was ill-gotten. So yeah, I think it is fair to say this wasn’t a legitimate win by plenty of metrics.

I’m not sure what group — activist, political, or otherwise — created the cards, to be clear. But it expresses a widely held sentiment.

Benjamin Hart11:57 AM

yeah, I have to say I’ve been on the other side on that debate – while I think kemp is a dirty character and absolutely employed the underhanded tactics we’ve all heard about, “stolen” struck me as a rhetorical bridge too far, for the reasons that a) it’s an escalation that I’m not sure is useful in the wider context of institutional delegitimization that republicans are pushing and b) we don’t actually KNOW if kemp’s actions swung the election, though we can suspect they did. I’m interested to hear you say otherwise, though.

Zak Cheney-Rice12:07 PM

I think it’s a useful and accurate frame, but it definitely has a veneer of plausible deniability because so much of what goes into “stealing” these elections takes place long before election day. Brian Kemp can always point to the fact that he’s acting well within the law, but it’s important to note these are laws he and/or his party created, likely for this very purpose. If you disenfranchise more than a million people — often for quibbling bureaucratic irregularities — and do so in a way that pretty transparently targets those whose lives are already beset by instability and unpredictability around housing, transportation, and employment, you are essentially creating the electorate you want. In Republicans’ case, that electorate is one skewed toward maintaining white, and conservative, power, at the expense of black voters, young voters, and poor voters (all of which often overlap). So the question of “theft,” it seems to me, is purely rhetorical. In our technical, traditional understanding of elections, we would not necessarily describe elections that took place in the Jim Crow South as “stolen.” But if roughly half of the Jim Crow South’s electorate is either barred from voting outright or forced to navigate an insane labyrinth of inconveniences, barriers, and sometimes outright violence to cast their ballots, it’s a stretch to describe that as legitimate, either.

That is, of course, a matter of differing scale. But it doesn’t take much to tip an election like Kemp-Abrams.

Also, it’s not our job as voters to keep falsely believing our elections are “legitimate” when clearly, in several key ways, the evidence suggests otherwise.

That distinction is earned.

Benjamin Hart12:12 PM

all good and useful points. but I do think the phraseology matters. would you say that the florida election was stolen because of the state’s disenfranchisement of felons?

Zak Cheney-Rice12:24 PM

It does matter, I think, but I haven’t found any of the arguments that dismiss such phrasing as extreme, or bemoan how it sows mistrust in our systems, to be especially convincing. I do believe that locking up black people at disproportionate rates, then ensuring they cannot vote even after they’ve done time, is doing the same work that racist voter suppression does by all the means listed above. It is stealing their right to vote, plain and simple. I think we can have a nuanced discussion about whether that means elections are being “stolen” outright or not (I tend to lean toward yes) but at the end of the day I think the more pressing issue is that we are building our democracy by ensuring people who should be able to vote cannot, and that we perhaps need more urgent language to describe the actual stakes there.

The California union that provided major funding for successful ballot campaigns to expand Medicaid in three red states this year is already looking for where to strike next to expand Obamacare coverage in the Donald Trump era.

Leaders of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West declined to identify which states they might target in 2020. But the six remaining states where Medicaid could be expanded through the ballot are on the group’s radar: Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.

NEW: CNN asks court for an emergency hearing Monday afternoon, as the White House still plans to boot CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, despite court order that reinstated the journalist. https://t.co/vrmtazbgcI